by Jeffrey Jason Hill

Created on: June 12, 2009   Last Updated: February 11, 2011

George Bernard Shaw said, ''This is a world which our own folly keeps from being a paradise.' There are still natural disasters, floods, fires, mudslides, volcanic activity, earthquakes, tornadoes, tsunamis, etc. That's alot right there even if the races got along. So it seems redundant to say, no, this isn't a perfect world.

It seems we have wildly missed the mark of whatever our Designer intended for us. Random acts of kindness and spontaneous beauty are not enough to negate the horrific damage left in a madman's wake.

"The mind is maya." This is the teaching of Hinduism which best describes the lack of perfection we see around us. One of India's greatest spiritual sages, Ramana Maharshi, uttered it. It summarizes the collective mental illness of the human mind. One only need look at the twentieth century to know what I mean.

In Buddhism, the mind in its normal state gives off 'dukkha,' which is suffering, inhumanity, unhappiness. Eventually everyone is bound to encounter it. Madness is seen as characteristic of the human condition.

All of the world's major religions accommodate the inherent proclivity of man to do wrong, to cause suffering, and to suffer. Religion acknowledges that ours is not a perfect world.

Science, too, has come to grips with the limitations of a less-than-perfect world. It has conquered many diseases, broken the genetic code, and even given us an efficient public toilet system. We take for granted a system that enables us to collect and dispose of billions of liters of urine and millions of kilograms of fecal matter per day. In medieval times and even countless centuries before, most people did open defecation. In other areas, however, the efficiency promised by science has only given us more pollution, gridlock, and singles bars.

And so there is in us this inconsolable longing. As parents, we dread the day when our children's innocence will be taken away by the harsh realities of the world, by some slight unintended or not, by a broken heart, or by witnessing some grisly horror firsthand. Neither science or religion can tell us exactly why a day care center full of children goes up in flames, taking the lives of all the children inside.

If you are like most people, you either believe in either religion or science to save us. Regardless of which one you believe, there can be no doubt about the unanswered questions that each poses to us, questions I rather suspect will always remain unanswered until one of them breaks in on us and goes from faith to seeing, from hope to having.

Learn more about this author, Jeffrey Jason Hill.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.